Well if they don''t get rid of the "fun" stuff, then how else are they ever going to get most of you people to leave?

Sir Robin, the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot.
Who had nearly fought the Dragon of Angnor.
Who had almost stood up to the vicious Chicken of Bristol.
And who had personally wet himself, at the Battle of Badon Hill.

No, the servers don't go down at all. The servers are still online, you just need to restart your client. I often restart the client the moment I get that "your client will restart automatically in 3 minutes" message, and I'm often back in the game in way less time than that, while other people are still trying to frantically finish whatever they're in the middle of. If you really see that as such a terrible thing, then uh... boy are your standards high.

Once again, I never said it was a terrible thing. If you're going to argue with someone, at least take the time to read and comprehend their posts rather than making up what you want to see. What I AM SAYING is that skill point bugs need to be fixed and server restarts are a reasonable enough way to do it until they come up with a permanent fix. This is not because skill points are necessary but rather because it eliminates an entire portion of the game (exploration). New patches, however small they may be, reset things like spawns and quest NPCs. This fixes issues that many people are currently having. Check the official forums for verification.

I'm truly not trying to be hostile here and I'm honestly sorry if that's how I'm coming off. The things you have been posting on this board have been great and quite fun to read because I enjoy the game with just as much passion as you seem to. However, this is the only significant negative I've encountered so far (only because it puts a roadblock on 100% world completion) and I would like as many opportunities as possible for myself and others to finish these. If that means the slightly more occasional restart, I'm for it.

Very very little downtime, but still a lot of bugs to work out. I do love how little downtime there's been though. Big kudus to ANet for somehow finding a way to be able to avoid normal maintenance. I can't imagine how they managed that technical feat. Most MMOs just become bogged down and broken the longer the game is left up without a cold server reboot, which is why maintenance is generally necessary. Perhaps it has something to do with the instanced nature of the zones?

Very very little downtime, but still a lot of bugs to work out. I do love how little downtime there's been though. Big kudus to ANet for somehow finding a way to be able to avoid normal maintenance. I can't imagine how they managed that technical feat. Most MMOs just become bogged down and broken the longer the game is left up without a cold server reboot, which is why maintenance is generally necessary. Perhaps it has something to do with the instanced nature of the zones?

I have no insider insight this is just speculation but I imagine they have redundancy servers/blades on which they load a new build then, tell players to restart the client, and once you do, you zone into the new server (best and fastest way to push a new build with minimal downtime, imo).

I have no insider insight this is just speculation but I imagine they have redundancy servers/blades on which they load a new build then, tell players to restart the client, and once you do, you zone into the new server (best and fastest way to push a new build with minimal downtime, imo).

That seems plausible, though that also seems really expensive from a hardware POV.

That seems plausible, though that also seems really expensive from a hardware POV.

Well yes, and I honestly don't know much about gaming server infrastructure as I only worked in a service/public environment but we did have redundant servers for things we needed to have as close as possible to 100% uptime. For instance, we housed the servers for a nation-wide repository of academic information (papers, thesis, research) that had dual redundancy with frequent backups that ALSO had redundancy (we're talking about 800 TB of information, if memory doesn't fail me). It was expensive but it was the best way to assure there would be as little down-time as possible and what we did was in the vein of what I suggest earlier: Whenever a new software build was pushed in, we compiled it into the dormant server, get everything ready, brought the active down, and the service started on the other -previously dormant- server.

[The previous value of 1.2 PB was for a sum of a bunch of different backups, disregard that]

Haha ye That's how they lost 70% of the playerbase when factions was released, nerfing the 55.
Make people quit, and patching the game with this purpose, so smartass

70% of the player base? What are you smoking man? Even if that had been true, there would be no possible way you would know that unless you were an Anet employee at that time. And THAT many people leaving because they fixed what was basically an exploit of the skills currently in the game? Lol. If you leave for that reason alone, you REALLY need an attitude adjustment. Guild Wars actually only got bigger with each expansion, both in content and player base. They didn't really start losing out on people in huge droves until after EotN and that was because any further MAJOR content was cancelled to give them more resources to start working on GW2.

I have no insider insight this is just speculation but I imagine they have redundancy servers/blades on which they load a new build then, tell players to restart the client, and once you do, you zone into the new server (best and fastest way to push a new build with minimal downtime, imo).

I don't think so as their update system is patented.
A quick google search on ANet's patents should net some results.